The quest

It all started several years ago, when we led a common middle-class life in a suburban area in the Netherlands. While pursuing whatever most of people pursue in their lives — a safe and nice home, a steady and fulfilling occupation, quality time with the family, some spare time to grow oneself — we came to realize that this was not the way to achieve these goals. To be more accurate, it was so complex to achieve these goals that, almost constantly, the end of the day found us drained, exhausted and with a feeling of not much of an accomplishment. The next day used to be even worse, as with the prospect of a similar day ahead of us, there was not much of an incentive to get us out of bed. When all these feelings got really heavy in us, we decided that we had to do something about this pickle. After some research outside and inside alike, we came to the following conclusion: “A good and fulfilling life shouldn’t be that complex”. At least not for us. We realized that we had to do something about it and we should do it then, not at some point in the future, where our pensions would keep on coming in our bank accounts and everything would be ideal and perfect and no worries would hung upon our shoulders, right?

The decision of leading a simple life was taken back then so we started enthusiastically reorganizing our lives with a simple rule in mind: “In order to lead a simple life, every day should be simpler than the previous one”. With this rule in mind — and a thousand little other ones — we begun to reconstruct our everyday lives by trying to change things around us which could be changed by us, not waiting for somebody else to do the work for us. There were a lot of techniques we had to learn, sometimes we had to dive in completely new fields for us — and till this very moment, we still do. The fields we’ve occupied ourselves till now, and without exhausting the list and your patience, are : gardening, health care, personal hygiene, cooking, all kinds of DIY, financial management and many others which you will be able to discover by yourself, if you browse around on this site. We put our hands and minds to many fields, at different periods of time and as a consequence we are on a different level of competence in every one of them. It’s a long and on-going process and by no means do we claim to be masters of any of them. Simply because that is not our goal. Our goal is to engage ourselves in every aspect of our lives that blocks us from living in a simpler and more fulfilling manner. Now if that engagement means a certain level of proficiency or skill, we gladly take up the challenge and try our best.

By creating this website, we would like to report and note down this effort of ours towards a simpler life. We also think that, as most of the things we are going to report are tested by us and worked hands down — otherwise why report them — they may be beneficial to other people living the same kind of perplexity in certain aspects of their lives. We are very fond of spreading knowledge in general, but especially practical knowledge which is capable of freeing us from preconceived or prefabricated notions that cause a lot of confusion, frustration and utterly a blockage most of people experience in modern times. Finally, we aspire to show actively how to shoot for a simple life in a step-by-step manner and by our example, maybe, some hope and inspiration will crawl into people’s minds and souls, which is by far the most effective driving force for any change. So, please, do read on and we eagerly wait for your comments and proposals.

PS: I managed to write our quest webpage without using the heavily overused words: self-sufficiency, self-reliance and sustainability, so that’s already an achievement in its own right. For me at least.